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In today’s newsletter,
How a skincare brand with 2 employees beat L'Oréal at trust
How the Instagram Explore page algorithm actually works
Don't touch your evergreen ads in Q4
How a beauty founder built a 65-brand collab network from scratch
While You Were Building
1.Harry's borrows the streetwear drop playbook
2.Swatch stole the sneaker hype playbook
3.Infomercials are back as a DTC channel
Your best-converting marketing asset isn’t your ad.
This issue takes 2 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
Free webinar
How a skincare brand with 2 employees beat L'Oréal at trust (and how to increase your brand’s AI recommendations)
As AI ecommerce evolves, big brands face a growing flaw: the bigger they get, the harder it is for AI agents to recommend them.
This is because your data gets messier as your catalog grows. Prices vary, descriptions clash, and supply chains get opaque. To an AI system trying to answer a customer's prompt ("Find me the cleanest, most reliable skincare brand"), a messy catalog looks contradictory and untrustworthy.
And when an AI agent isn't 100% confident in your trust signals, it simply recommends your competitor.
This is why a tiny 2-person brand could humiliate L'Oréal on the battlefield of trust-inspired AI recommendations. They used a "verifiable data stack" that made automated transparency impossible for AI to ignore.
In exactly 1 week, we are exposing the exact mechanism a 2-person company used to out-convert multi-billion-dollar empire, L’Oreal.
Join us live: How a Skincare Brand With 2 Employees Beat L'Oréal at Trust (and how to increase your brand’s AI recommendations)
Thursday, 4th June | 6pm UK / 1pm ET / 10am PT · Live workshop with Ankur Modi (ex-Meta, Ex-Amazon systems architect, & NASDAQ IPO veteran). 60-minute session
What you'll learn in 1 hr:
How to turn your product claims into a high-converting asset that attracts organic traffic from AI engines
The silent structural errors killing your conversion rates
How verifying your brand for AI engines cuts your customer acquisition costs.
How to create infrastructure that makes your brand AI’s default recommendation for the next decade
🔥Bonus for attendees - live store audits
If you want in, just use the form below to register and Ankur will dissect your site in real-time (privacy ensured - no replays), showing you exactly where competitors are outperforming you to AI agents…and how to take your market share back.
P.S: We’ll briefly open the floor to live Q&A - treat this as a high-level strategic session, and bring tough questions your team can’t solve
Organic Content
How the Instagram Explore page algorithm actually works
The Explore page is how people who've never heard of you find you. Most founders ignore it. Here's how it works and what to do about it.
Add trending audio. Instagram tracks which sounds are taking off. Use a trending track when it fits naturally and your post has a better shot at reaching new people.
Keep reels under 90 seconds. Instagram will show reels up to three minutes to non-followers, but shorter performs better. The sweet spot is 30 to 90 seconds.
Watch your shares, not just your likes. When someone DMs your post to a friend who doesn't follow them, Instagram reads that as a strong quality signal. Check insights regularly, find what gets shared most, and make more of that.
Action Summary:
Open Instagram insights and sort recent posts by shares
Use a trending audio track on your next reel when it fits naturally
Keep reels between 30 and 90 seconds
Look at your top shared posts and write down what they have in common
Credit: Buffer
Campaign command center
Don't touch your evergreen ads in Q4
Most brands treat Black Friday like a hard reset. Holiday campaigns go live, evergreen ads get paused, and the whole account goes into seasonal mode.
Caraway doesn't do this. Jordan's founder ad, their single best-performing creative, ran straight through Black Friday and Cyber Monday without being touched. Their logic: a top performer doesn't stop working just because there's a sale on.
They're not alone in thinking this. Performance media experts recommend keeping evergreen campaigns running alongside Black Friday campaigns, noting that evergreen ads often end up performing higher than anticipated during the peak period.
If budget is the constraint, the advice is to lower the budget on evergreen, but never stop it completely.
The reason is practical.
Keeping BFCM-specific ads separate from your evergreen account structure means you can expect a lift across all your always-on campaigns during the sale period.
There's also a structural cost to pausing. Every time you turn off a campaign, you lose the momentum Meta's algorithm built around it. Restarting in January means going back through the learning phase at a time when you're already dealing with a post-holiday slowdown.
Caraway's approach is simple. Holiday creative runs in its own campaigns. Evergreen stays on. The two work together, not instead of each other.
40 to 50% of Caraway's annual revenue happens in November and December. They can't afford to leave a proven asset on the bench.
Action Summary:
Identify your single best-performing evergreen ad before Q4 planning starts
Keep it live through the entire holiday period, in its own campaign, untouched
Build your holiday creative in separate campaigns that run on top of your evergreen structure, not in place of it
Credit: Dara Denney
Pod Bites
How a beauty founder built a 65-brand collab network from scratch
In this DTC Daily Podcast, Lynn Power, founder of clean haircare brand MASAMI and the Power Beauty Collab, broke down how she turned a scrappy pandemic workaround into a 65-brand partnership network that now reaches over a million people combined on social media.
Start with values alignment, not audience size: Your first filter shouldn't be a brand's follower count. It's whether they share the same values and serve a similar customer. A mass-market brand in a premium collab confuses everyone. Get that wrong and the audience crossover doesn't convert.
Eliminate the guesswork on deliverables: The most common reason collabs fall apart isn't bad intentions. It's vague expectations. Send participating brands the exact post count, email frequency, and creative assets they need.
The community benefit beyond reach: When you're in a group of founders who've been through it, you shortcut a ton of time. Someone in the group has already dealt with ADA compliance lawsuits, tariff issues, fulfillment problems, Hurricane Milton.
Action Summary:
List 5-10 brands that share your values and serve a similar customer, not direct competitors, but adjacent
Reach out with a specific, low-lift first collab (a joint giveaway or shared discount page) so the yes is easy
Write out the exact deliverables before anyone commits: post dates, email count, creative assets
While You Were Building
1.Harry's borrows the streetwear drop playbook
The razor brand is running limited-edition body wash drops to reach a younger buyer. Legacy DTC is reaching for streetwear's release calendar as paid-acquisition costs make evergreen SKUs harder to launch.
via Modern Retail • Read more
2.Swatch stole the sneaker hype playbook
Audemars Piguet's Swatch collab is the most-discussed product release of 2026 so far, run on a limited-drop model lifted straight from sneakers. The hype tactic outlives the category that invented it.
via Business of Fashion • Read more
3.Infomercials are back as a DTC channel
Joy Mangano's CleanBoss is seeing sales spikes from cable direct-response ads. She calls TV shopping 'her best-kept secret.'
via Modern Retail • Read more
Influencer Marketing
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Have questions or feedback? You can write to kaushal@dtcdailynews.com